Every year, the Marlow family rents a cabin for a weekend at Backbone, Iowa's first state park. It's a great place to relax, spend time with the family and get back to nature. It's also a nice place to paint. And on this particular day, my plein air painting caused one man to share a painful story from his life.

After hiking the Devil's Backbone trail with Theresa, Betsy and Harley, I grabbed my easel and found a spot by the dam. I started painting late in the afternoon, around 4:00 pm. This did not give me much time, as the sun sets earlier in mid September, and the light is always changing. I finished just as the last sunbeams fell, around 7:00 pm. 

Painting plein air takes a certain level of confidence, because anyone can approach you to survey your work. Two people stopped by to see what I was doing. One man, a local resident from the nearby town of Dundee, talked to me for about 20 minutes. He told me that his late wife had painted the same scene years earlier. They had married young, he said wistfully, but they did not have any children. She painted for fun, and once she painted this little dam on a quiet northeast Iowa lake—the exact location that I was now painting.

His wife had died, and his wife's sister had kept the painting. Eventually he remarried, and had children with his second wife, but it was obvious that he still loved and missed his first. This man, perhaps a few years younger than me, stuck around and talked while I painted, repeating himself in that way we do when we wax nostalgic over someone loved and lost. At this point, I should have stopped to listen, but I was losing daylight fast. Finally, I stopped painting, turned and looked him in the eye. "Oh man, that's rough.", I said. "I'm sorry for your loss". He appeared happy now, but he told me that seeing me paint this scene 'triggered something in me'.

If I had been further along in the painting, I would have given it to him.

It was fascinating that a complete stranger would open up to me about something so painful in his life. Seeing me paint the same subject his late wife had painted obviously stirred something in him. I'm glad he felt compelled to share his story with me. It amazes me to think that the simple act of putting pigment on canvas can elicit such strong emotions. But a painting can do that. Perhaps that is the secret to creating a good work of art—it should make the viewer feel something.

It was an ideal day to paint. Mild temperatures and zero breeze meant the surface of the lake was as smooth as glass. Betsy joined me and painted on a canvas of her own. Working with oils in the great outdoors can be difficult. Painting wet-on-wet, or alla prima (Italian, meaning at first attempt), is a painting technique I'm not used to using, but it was a lot of fun. 
Three hours flew by in a flash.

It was such a perfect day. This is the second plein air painting I've done—below is the first one, painted two years earlier at the same park.